BANGOR, Maine — A former EMT and firefighter was sentenced Monday in U.S. District Court to 4½ years in prison for possession of child pornography.
Zachary Allen Winship, 34, of Rangeley pleaded guilty to the charge earlier this year. Winship worked as an EMT at North Star in Farmington until this spring.
U.S. District Judge John Woodcock also sentenced Winship to 10 years of supervised release after he completes his prison term. He faced up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. Under the federal sentencing guideline range, the recommended sentence was from 46 to 57 months in federal prison.
Winship resigned from the Orono Fire Department in 2000 after pornography was found on city-owned computers, Woodcock said, referring to the presentence report prepared by the U.S. Probation and Pre-Trial Services.
He was not charged with a crime until after customs officials found pornographic images of teenage girls and girls between the ages of 10 and 12 on Winship’s laptop computer when he was referred for a secondary inspection at the airport in Philadelphia in March 2006. He and his then-wife were returning from a vacation trip to Jamaica, where they had been vacationing, when the pornography was found.
Winship was questioned and released in Philadelphia, according to court documents, but on the return trip to Maine, he told his then-wife that he had similar material on their home computer. When the couple returned home, she dismantled the couple’s home computer and turned it over to her attorney, who turned it over to police.
That computer contained videos and still photographs of minor girls engaged in sexually explicit conduct, according to court documents.
Woodcock said Monday that one of the videos shows a girl of about 4 engaged in sexual activity with an adult male. The judge called the material found on Winship’s computers “abhorrent” and “shocking.”
jharrison@bangordailynews.net
990-8207